The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the balloons, but a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew strong and steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a short run into the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite, bobbing this way and that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it stabilized, and he reeled it out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle quiverings in his arms. Or else he wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the resistance, and watched the kite soar up and away. The line was nearly invisible. When the spool ran out the line hummed, and if he held it between his fingers, the wind’s fluctuations were communicated to him as a kind of music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a time, out of sight or, if he kept it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw in the sky. Transmitting data all the while. A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area. The mind was a funny animal.

Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the hardest kind of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look down and to the right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was elsewhere, that he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.

“Come visit and go for a walk with me,” Sax said again. “I really think you should.” How could one emphasize that? “I really think you should.” Throw things together. “Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water.”

Michel nodded uncertainly.

Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in Da Vinci. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Europe.”

“Good man.”

So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the Shalbatana cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point. Such a pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing any of the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that he treasured. The weeks would pass in their comfortable round, and then suddenly one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming without the home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sa-bishii or Odessa someday, so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more often.

And no one’s company pleased him more than Michel’s. Although on this day Michel wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed this, and wondered what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help in the long months of his return to speech — had taught him to think again, had taught him to see everything differently. It would be nice if he could do something to repay such a gift, even partially.

Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they stopped, and Sax got out the kite and assembled it, he handed the spool to Michel.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That way, into the wind.” And he held the kite as Michel walked across the grassy mounds, until the line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started running, and off it went, up up up.

Michel came back grinning. “Here, touch the line — you can feel the wind.”

“Ah,” Sax said. “So you can.” And the nearly invisible line thrummed against his fingers.

They sat down and opened Sax’s wicker basket, and took out the picnic lunch he had packed. Michel became quiet once again.

“Something is troubling you?” Sax ventured as they ate.

Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. “I think I want to go back to Provence.”

“For good?” Sax said, shocked.

Michel frowned. “Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just beginning to enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave.”

“It’s heavy on Earth.”

“True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy.”

“Hmm.” Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly evolution had adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g caused an array of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g now, to the point he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.

“Without Maya?” he said.

“I suppose it would have to be. She doesn’t want to go. She says she will someday, but it’s always later, later. She’s working for the credit co-op bank in Sabishii, and thinks she’s indispensable. Well, that’s not fair. She just doesn’t want to miss any of it.”

“Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an olive grove?”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, but…”

Sax didn’t know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As for living with Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine living in a damaged erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus perhaps Michel’s desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.

“You should go,” Sax said. “But wait just a little longer. If they get these pulsed fusion engines on spaceships, then you could be there fairly soon.”

“But that might cause real problems with Earth’s gravity. I think you need the months of the trip to get prepared for it.”

Sax nodded. “What you would need is a kind of exoskeleton. Inside it you’d feel somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps. Those new birdsuits I’ve heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to something like an exoskeleton, or you’d never be able to hold the wings in position.”

“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile. “A flowing shell.”

“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear walkers for a hundred years — then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”

“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”

Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that.” He shook his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”

The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the grass. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions himself.

After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?”

Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”

“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”

“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m afraid…”

Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”

“I know.”

On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled.